by Oisin McGann
None of what he had read could explain the vivid memories he was so convinced were false. People could be coerced through a variety of ways into saying and doing things that were completely out of character, but it always depended on what they believed. As soon as they started questioning these beliefs themselves, the programming's hold over them began to weaken.
Ivor had been questioning his memory for nearly a year and the events surrounding his injury were still sharp, fresh and exact in his mind.
When Amina finally put down the phone, her head was spinning. For the first time, she thought there might be some truth in what Ivor had said about his memories, and her conversion had nothing to do with all his research or reasoning. It was his tooth that had changed her mind.
Her hand went up to the right side of her mouth, rubbing her bottom lip and the incisor that lay beneath. It was an implant – the original tooth had been knocked out in a hockey game in school. She remembered how she had felt at the time. Ivor was right; it was serious. For the first time in her life she had felt truly vulnerable, aware of how badly she could be hurt. There was something deeply personal about losing an adult tooth. The fact that she had been permanently damaged – if only in this small way – caused her to cry on several occasions afterwards. It just wasn't like losing your baby teeth, those rootless little white nubs you put under your pillow for the tooth fairy; teeth that you knew would be replaced by stronger, adult versions.
Having an adult tooth knocked out left its mark . . . and not just as an empty hollow in your jaw. Ivor was right. You would remember.
The phone rang again, making her jump. She picked it up:
'Hello?'
'Amina? That Chi Sandwith guy is looking for you again.'
'Oh, sorry, Glenda, could you tell him I'm out?'
'I've told him that twice already, dear. He's been very persistent . . . and I'm afraid I only normally field crank calls for anyone of editor level and above.'
Glenda was the suit-clad godmother in charge of reception and Amina had been warned not to get on her bad side.
'Right, sorry.'
'Just this last time, then. I'll tell him you're in an editorial meeting. We can all dream, eh?'
'Great, thanks.'
8
It seemed Chi Sandwith didn't take 'no' for an answer.
Amina came out of the the Chronicle offices with a renewed sense of purpose. She had asked Goldbloom if she could follow up Ivor's story from a mental-health perspective and he had agreed, but with reservations. She had to keep up with her grunt work in the office and she had to use some discretion in her enquiries. He didn't want some fumbling temp traipsing around using the name of the paper to open doors. Having agreed that she would hold up her end of the office work and keep her traipsing to a minimum, Amina was given her chance to see how much more she could make of the story.
A tall guy with wiry fair hair, wearing trendy narrow-framed glasses and a dark grey trench coat intercepted her as she exited the front door of the building.
'Hi, Amina Mir?'
'Yes?'
'I'm Chi Sandwith,' he said brightly, extending his hand.'We spoke briefly on the phone? I've been trying to reach you for the last couple of days.'
'How did you know my name?'
'I did a search for you on the web. Your school team won a national hockey trophy two years ago. The team photo is proudly displayed on the school's website. Congratulations on your victory, by the way.'
She shook his hand, and looked around discreetly for an escape route.
'Twenty seconds,' he said.
'Sorry?'
'You're looking at me like I'm a double-glazing salesman. I'm not. Give me twenty seconds to explain my angle and then if you decide you never want to see or hear from me again, I'll honour your wishes.'
Amina blinked slowly, biting back a smile, and gave him a noncommittal nod.
'OK.' He grinned, nodding back. 'Ivor McMorris. He's a Sinnostan war veteran, right? Let me guess – he's showing symptoms of posttraumatic stress: hallucinations, nightmares, mood swings, paranoid delusions, yeah? Doesn't like going out? Thinks he's being watched?'
'You could just be—' Amina started to say.
'I could be fishing, yeah,' Chi cut her off. 'But I'm not. He was injured, wasn't he? Does he have unnaturally accurate memories of the period of two or three days when he picked up his injuries? Feels like an unchanging film in his mind?' He could see from Amina's face that he had scored a hit. 'He has, hasn't he? Have there been any periods since his discharge from the army when he feels like he's lost a day or more but can't explain why? No? Has he said anything about a group of people called the Scalps? No? Has he . . . has he seen any UFOs? No? Definitely not, huh? OK . . . these people who're watching him – does he have trouble seeing their faces? And I don't mean they're hidden or masked, I mean he could literally be looking straight at them and still not see any features on their faces . . . except maybe their eyes. Does he get that? He does, doesn't he?'
They were staring at each other now.
'He does,' Chi muttered again, almost to himself. 'That was longer than twenty seconds,' Amina said.
Chi didn't answer. He was gazing at her with a strange smile on his face.
'All right.' She lifted her chin. 'What do you know?'
She was a bit wary of letting Chi take her back to his house. He wasn't a very threatening type – slightly nerdy, a couple of years older than her, maybe twenty or so – but he was a big guy and showed definite signs of being a little unstable. They took a taxi, and he made a point of sitting behind the driver so he could look in the rear-view mirror, as well as casting his eyes out of the window on either side. Each of his hands, legs and head took turns jiggling to an imaginary beat, as if he couldn't bear to sit still. He didn't tell her a lot on the way there, preferring to try and tap her for information instead. Amina didn't give him much. She would wait to see what he had to offer first.
The house was impressive. A sprawling asymmetric building of rough stone and floor-toceiling windows, it spoke of comfortable, unassuming wealth. The shallowly sloping roofs extended into a veranda on the south side, overlooking a spacious garden.
Inside, it was a contrasting mix of areas; some dressed in trendy ethnic décor from around the world, others filled with a more homely clutter. Chi explained that he lived in the house with his parents, who were separated. They still shared the place, but arranged never to be there at the same time. His father normally lived in Switzerland and his mother in Florida. Both were computer geeks who'd made their money in the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Neither of them left much of a mark on the house and he couldn't fill it all by himself.
'So, Chi Sandwith, huh?'Amina commented as they strolled through the hallway and kitchen and into a wing of the house where the clutter had long dominated. 'You get many cracks about cheese sand—'
'Never. Never heard that one before,' Chi interrupted her. 'What can I say? My folks had more spiritualism than sense. Suppose they thought that calling me "life energy" was pretty cool.'
'OK. Weeeellll . . . let's see what you've got.'
Judging by the shelves of disks, the plans chest and a full wall of filing cabinets, he had a lot – but Amina wasn't sure how much of it was actually going to be relevant . . . or even real. Her heart sank when she saw the poster that hung on one wall. It was a photo of a blurred image of what was presumably a flying saucer against dusky clouds. Why was it that UFOs never showed up when there was a competent photographer around armed with a long-lens and tripod? Across the bottom of the poster were the words: WATCH THE SKIES.
There were no windows in this room. A powerful PC with a stack of servers, peripheral hardware and three monitors occupied one desk, and another was taken up with tools and half-built electrical devices she couldn't identify. A ginger cat with white belly and paws wandered in after them and jumped up on the computer desk, watching Chi as he moved about the room. He had taken a gadget about the size of a
television remote from his pocket and was walking methodically back and forth across the room, waving it around.
'Counter-surveillance,' he muttered. 'Checking for radio signals. Can't be too careful.'
'No. I suppose not.'
Amina continued to look around. The place was dusty and cluttered, but not untidy. It looked like Chi was particular about his organization. Everything was labelled with a series of letters and numbers that suggested a reference system of some kind. One wall was taken up with photographs and newspaper and magazine clippings, as well as printouts from websites. Most of the pictures were of soldiers in Asia, the Middle East or North Africa. There were also some drawings: figures with smudged or blurred faces.
'OK, we're fine,' Chi declared with a satisfied grunt. 'Let's get down to business.'
They settled down on comfortable leather swivel chairs in front of the computer screens so that Chi could click through various windows while he talked.
'Ivor McMorris is not alone. I have interview material from more than twenty Sinnostan veterans who suffer from similar symptoms. Each of them says they know others like them – the tally could run into the hundreds, maybe even thousands. I got some of this information from the National News – I do the odd article for them – but most of this I've picked up myself from interviews, veteran support sites, as well as television reports and articles like yours. These things lie around the edges of the big stories but I've spent the last couple of years distilling them . . . building them into a bigger picture.
'There are some common threads that run through each of these people's stories: the two or three days of memories that seem unreal – or too real; the certainty that they are missing some part of that time; hallucinations or nightmares of being wheeled along a corridor while bound onto a hospital trolley, of being paralysed while dark figures operate on them; some are convinced that they're being watched and just a few cases have experienced what your guy McMorris has talked about: seeing people with blurred faces. Blurred faces with eyes. I think those cases may be the ones who really are under surveillance.'
As he spoke, he clicked through photos of the people he had spoken to, or the reports he had drawn his information from.
'It's taken me a long time to separate out all of the relevant stuff, I can tell you. War generates all kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories. There are a lot of nuts out there.'
'I can imagine,' Amina said. 'So what's your theory?'
'I'm only getting started,' Chi replied, motioning with his hands to urge patience. 'One guy I spoke to has some of the symptoms, but he wasn't a soldier. His name's Stefan Gierek and he was a truck driver in Sinnostan, a civilian contractor. And he's different from the others. He was with a platoon of Royal Marines just outside Kring-Jintot when it was attacked. Like so many of the other engagements in this little war, it was out in the middle of nowhere. I've read the reports on it; all of the surviving marines tell the story exactly the same way: they were driving in a convoy through a severe storm when they came under fire in a narrow gorge not far from the village. They returned fire and called for air support but couldn't get through on the radios. They eventually got out of the valley and made a fighting withdrawal to the village where they were based.
'But Gierek swears there was no attack. He was bringing up the rear of the convoy and he was late. He says that when he pulled up, he saw the vehicles stopped in the gorge – the front APC had run off the road. Everyone was slumped in their seats or on the ground around the vehicles. He thought they were all dead until he checked a couple of them and discovered they were asleep. Gierek is a complete survival nut; he had better gear than half the soldiers there. He kept a detailed journal of his experiences in Sinnostan and one of the pieces of kit he carried was a webcam concealed in the rim of his helmet. His memories of the incident are much the same as the soldiers', if a little more conflicted. But this is what his camera saw next.'
Chi clicked on a file and a movie-player window appeared. The camera was looking from Gierek's point of view as he climbed out of the cab of his sand-coloured truck. The picture was low resolution and moved jerkily, the view changing constantly as he looked around him. His movements were confused. There was sound: Gierek swearing to himself, breathing heavily, dust and small stones blowing against the truck and the huffing of a strong wind across the microphone. It was hard to see anything in the low light of the storm, but it was clear that there were bodies lying around the vehicles ahead. One other military-style, four-wheel-drive truck was visible, with its distinct chunky wheels and high chassis, and ahead of it, the more angular shapes of two armoured personnel carriers with roof-mounted heavy machine-guns. The rest of the gorge was hidden in the blustery clouds of dust.
'Look like a raging fire-fight to you?' Chi asked quietly.
Gierek hurried forward, the camera bouncing with his movement. He came upon the body of a soldier in full combat kit, semi-automatic rifle still held in limp hands. Gierek's hand reached down and checked for breathing and pulse. He stood up and ran on, checking others. Two, then three more were found to be unconscious.
Amina was riveted by the film. Had Ivor gone through something like this? It was hard to picture him out there: a recognizable face, a real human in this surreal scene. She was struck by memories of her own, of something she'd seen years ago.
Gierek's movements were becoming erratic, panicky. He suddenly reacted to something, swinging round to look behind him. There was a bright light and then something knocked him to the ground. The light scorched the scene white and then the film ended.
Amina found she was leaning forward towards the screen. She sat back and crossed her arms.
'OK, I'm intrigued,' she admitted. 'So what was going on?'
'I don't really know,' Chi replied. He looked at her warily for a moment, and then shrugged. 'My contacts and I think we're looking at an honest-to- God alien abduction.'
Amina tilted her head, but otherwise her expression remained unchanged.
'You think that's stupid, I can tell,' he said to her.
Yes, she thought to herself. I think you'd really have to be looking for an alien abduction to find one on that film. You'd have to be a full-on UFO conspiracy nut to believe something like that.
Her phone rang, and she took it from her bag, thankful for the interruption. It was Dani.
'Sorry, I just have to get this,' Amina said.
This was a chance to get out of here – to say she had to meet her friend, before the conversation became even more absurd. But still, she couldn't help wondering about that film . . . The phone kept ringing.
She gazed at the screen for a moment and then answered the phone.
'Hiya! Listen, can I call you back? In a meeting. Yeah, OK. Bye!'
Putting the phone back in her bag, she regarded the screen for a couple of seconds and then looked at Chi.
'OK, look . . . I don't think your theory's stupid,' she said carefully. 'I just think it's a big conclusion to jump to based on this film. I mean . . . there are a lot of other, much more down-to-earth explanations.'
'Like what? Did you see the way an entire platoon of hardcore Royal Marines were lying around like they just collapsed into a deep sleep?'
'Yes,' Amina responded. 'And it's absolutely weird. But isn't it more likely that they were just gassed or something? You know, like the terrorists in the siege of that theatre in Moscow?'
In 2002, a group of forty-two Chechen terrorists had taken eight hundred and fifty people hostage in a theatre in Moscow. Russian special forces had pumped an aerosol anaesthetic into the building to knock out the occupants before launching an assault. Most of the terrorists had realized what was happening and put on respirators, but more than a hundred and twenty hostages had been killed by the 'knockout' gas. Most of them were thought to have choked on their own tongues as they slumped unconscious in the theatre seats. The thought that you could die so easily had terrified Amina for days. She had sat up with her parents, watching the repo
rts of the aftermath of the siege with morbid fascination.
Your body would always correct its own position when you were asleep, but if like these people you were comatose and sitting with your head hanging back, the limp muscle of your tongue could flop back over your windpipe and stop you breathing. Contrary to popular myth, you could not 'swallow' your tongue – it was attached to the bottom of your mouth, after all – but it could still block your breathing and kill you. Amina remembered one Russian doctor saying that most of these people could have been saved if somebody had just tipped their heads forward. It was funny how the little details stuck in your mind.
She imagined herself in the theatre, walking along between the rows of seats, thoughtfully tipping people's heads forward or lying them on their sides in the recovery position, ready for the paramedics.
'The Russian military were really secretive about the gas they used,' she pointed out. 'They wouldn't even tell the doctors treating the hostages.'
'You can't release gas in the middle of a storm,' Chi argued. 'It would all just . . . y'know . . . blow away. And anyway, most were in their vehicles.'
'Maybe the gas was released in the vehicles,' Amina suggested. 'That would be a good way to do it, wouldn't it? And . . . and . . .' She threw her hands up in exasperation. 'Look, why would anyone assume this had been done by aliens? What have aliens got to do with anything? Why can't this just have been done by people? Why does it have to be mysterious spaceships covered in flashing lights?'
'They're not covered in flashing lights,' he said sulkily. 'Those are always the hoaxes. If someone wanted to observe mankind in secret, do you really think they'd stick great big lights all over their vehicle? No. Think stealth bomber and you're closer to the truth. The lights are some kind of weapon.'